The Storyteller's Secret

By

Jim Fusilli

October 19, 2011

Petaluma, Calif.

Tom Waits suggests a Chinese restaurant here as a place to meet. Amid wall fans, a goldfish tank and a zodiac placemat that he later folds and slips into his black flap-over book bag, he says: "There's no such thing as bad Chinese food."

If you know Mr. Waits's work—and his new album, "Bad as Me" (Anti), surely represents it well—you know that he and his songwriting partner, Kathleen Brennan, could make a song out of a line like that. They do as much on the new disc. "Everybody knows umbrellas cost more in the rain" sets up the hard-luck tale of "Talking at the Same Time." "We won't have to say goodbye if we all go" is a line in "Chicago." One song, "Hell Broke Luce," got its title from three words Mr. Waits saw during a visit to Alcatraz—they were knife-carved into a stone wall during a prison riot. "I figured he thought if you spell it 'loose,' that's more letters," Mr. Waits said. "It's during a riot." The 61-year-old keeps memo pads in his back pocket to jot down phrases he's heard.

ENLARGE

Tom Waits
Christopher Serra

Though he said a line can pop up at inopportune times ("They're like erotic thoughts in church. Or at a PTA meeting. They're not welcome."), he's reluctant to discuss how the songwriting process begins. "No one really wants you to tell them how it's done any more than you want to know how a card trick is done." When pressed, he added: "If you want a recipe for banana bread, I'll leave three things out."

Mr. Waits and Ms. Brennan, who have been married 30 years, set aside time to write. "There's a certain formal beginning." he said. "You can't just say we'll get to it when we get to it because other things will take the place of it."

"Bad as Me," Mr. Waits's 20th studio album, confirms that he and Ms. Brennan are among the best songwriting partnerships America has produced—and a rebuttal to anyone who claims all the pages of the Great American Songbook were filled years ago. It's a true collaboration, he said, with only a trace of the gravel in his singing voice. "It's even-steven. My wife has a peculiar approach to melody. Very different than my own."

Though Mr. Waits's recordings of their compositions are often dressed with unorthodox arrangements that blend elements of Weimar cabaret, Mexican folk, industrial rock, postbop and R&B, the songs can be stripped down to their essentials. Over a cup of hot tea, he reminds his visitor he was a solo performer for a long while.

Gleefully mixing metaphors, he said of an emerging song: "I have to be willing to look at it like a three-legged table. If you've got three legs, you know it can stand up. Then we can put stripes on its tie or give it a toupee, but you need to have something to hang it on." He added: "I'm usually more about the nucleus of it all."

The arrangements are fleshed out in the studio: "I don't go in with a blueprint like I'm building a box," he said. On "Bad as Me," Mr. Waits is surrounded by an extraordinary cast, including Les Claypool, Flea, Charlie Musselwhite, Patrick Warren and the songwriters' son Casey Waits on drums. The guitarists include David Hidalgo, Keith Richards and Marc Ribot. They all get plenty of room to move.

"Sometimes you tell a musician 'I want to hear what comes to you.' You don't even tell them what you want them to play." On "Get Lost," Mr. Waits said, "David played a riff that sounds like a Ray Charles Wurlitzer. But he didn't play it again." Ms. Brennan found it on the recording of an earlier take. "She said, 'This is the foundation.'"

The arrangement of "Chicago," the album's opener, is built on a banjo figure by Mr. Waits. "I made it sound like an old-time train bell. That stayed in. We built on it. We started a groove."

The underpinning of the dreamy ballad "Face to the Highway" may have too much going on for its melody's fragility. Mr. Waits agrees. He saw it as a song a man would sing as he played guitar, his feet dangling off a boxcar. But it isn't unusual for Mr. Waits to sing above a bulging arrangement or what sounds like clatter. Anything can be music, he said, even a vacuum cleaner or the grinding of a garbage truck compacting trash.

"It's not a pleasant sound if you're trapped under the wheels," he pointed out. "If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment."

As for what seems to be a grab-bag of different styles in his sound, he said: "Your head is a melting pot. You tell all the things you're listening to to get down and start melting. Trying to be original is kind of a futile thing."

The public Mr. Waits is a bona fide character, a stomping, yowling beatnik who reflects the eccentric, downtrodden characters he sings about. Over lunch, he relaxes and a natural storyteller emerges. He riffs on an episode of "The Twilight Zone," tells an anecdote about Lauren Bacall, and insists that a dead shark was once cut open in Barbados with a VCR in its stomach containing a tape of "Jaws." He lifts from his book bag a magazine dedicated to outsider art; he's fascinated by Dalton Ghetti, who carves incredibly detailed sculptures on the graphite tips of discarded pencils. The opportunity for a story arises: He imagines a friend visiting Mr. Ghetti and inadvertently writing with one of the carved pencils. He spins a yarn out of the message of a fortune cookie.

None of his stories, though, reveal the secret to turning a mood, an observation or a single line into a song. "The songwriter is the king of a thimble, the queen of the teacup," he says, quoting from his notebook.

"You know how they say no one should be there for the making of law and sausages? They should tack on songs to that list. It's kind of messy."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.